Wednesday Boy
The Nerd WhoFell to Earth
That's correct but to clarify the damage dealt is compared to the defender's Strength (plus appropriate armor) roll, not a static threshold.
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Damage Systems in RPGs?
- Thread starter Wanderlust
- Start date
That's correct but to clarify the damage dealt is compared to the defender's Strength (plus appropriate armor) roll, not a static threshold.
Wanderlust
First Post
Stormonu, I love me some Savage Worlds. I honestly think that if I had a complaint about the system is that it's actually too fast. I think what I'm looking to do is something with a lot of the simplicity and elegance of Savage Worlds, but with a hair more crunch.
Hm. Well, let me toss Classic Deadlands into the mix. This is a non-d20 game, the precursor to Savage Worlds. A lot more baroque than it's progeny...
Remember that this isn't a medieval fantasy game. It's "Weird West", and in the genre, you can expect that if someone with moderate levels of skill points a gun at you, if he gets lucky, you might end up dead when he pulls the trigger.
A typical revolver is perhaps the most common weapon around, and does 3d6 points of damage. The dice "explode" (roll again and add) on a 6, so there is no theoretical maximum damage from a single shot. The average roll on a d6 is 3.5. On an exploding d6, it is 4.2.
You take the damage, divide by the target's size (a 6 for man-sized things), dropping fractions. This gives you a number of wounds. So, an average shot will to 12.6 damage - two wounds.
Those wounds are applied to a hit location (one of your arms, one of your legs, your guts, or your head - if you weren't making a called shot, you roll on a chart). As you take wounds to *any* location, you start taking penalties to die rolls. If you take six wounds in a given location, that location is "maimed". A maimed arm or leg ceases to function. If you are maimed in the head or guts, you are dead.
Now, some caveats:
If you hit the head, you get 2 more dice of damage. If you hit the "gizzards" you get one extra die of damage. An average shot to the head does 3 wounds, and a good one can kill you outright.
PCs have "Fate chips" that can cancel wounds when they are taken, as if they never happened.
Any hit, even if it doesn't inflict wounds, also inflicts at least 1d6 "Wind" - this represents pain and short-term breathlessness, fatigue, shock. If you run out of wind, you don't die, but you're winded, and can't do anything effective until you catch your breath. A typical character has between 8 and 24 wind. So, while your wounds are piling up scattered across your body, your Wind is all going one place. So, it is quite possible for you to taken out of action by wind, even if you aren't all that hurt.
Oh, and non-magical healing is *slow*. It can take weeks to recover from a major wound.
The above are the rules for PCs. You can use them for major NPCs and monsters, but the rules suggest some simple ways to deal with "mooks".
Remember that this isn't a medieval fantasy game. It's "Weird West", and in the genre, you can expect that if someone with moderate levels of skill points a gun at you, if he gets lucky, you might end up dead when he pulls the trigger.
A typical revolver is perhaps the most common weapon around, and does 3d6 points of damage. The dice "explode" (roll again and add) on a 6, so there is no theoretical maximum damage from a single shot. The average roll on a d6 is 3.5. On an exploding d6, it is 4.2.
You take the damage, divide by the target's size (a 6 for man-sized things), dropping fractions. This gives you a number of wounds. So, an average shot will to 12.6 damage - two wounds.
Those wounds are applied to a hit location (one of your arms, one of your legs, your guts, or your head - if you weren't making a called shot, you roll on a chart). As you take wounds to *any* location, you start taking penalties to die rolls. If you take six wounds in a given location, that location is "maimed". A maimed arm or leg ceases to function. If you are maimed in the head or guts, you are dead.
Now, some caveats:
If you hit the head, you get 2 more dice of damage. If you hit the "gizzards" you get one extra die of damage. An average shot to the head does 3 wounds, and a good one can kill you outright.
PCs have "Fate chips" that can cancel wounds when they are taken, as if they never happened.
Any hit, even if it doesn't inflict wounds, also inflicts at least 1d6 "Wind" - this represents pain and short-term breathlessness, fatigue, shock. If you run out of wind, you don't die, but you're winded, and can't do anything effective until you catch your breath. A typical character has between 8 and 24 wind. So, while your wounds are piling up scattered across your body, your Wind is all going one place. So, it is quite possible for you to taken out of action by wind, even if you aren't all that hurt.
Oh, and non-magical healing is *slow*. It can take weeks to recover from a major wound.
The above are the rules for PCs. You can use them for major NPCs and monsters, but the rules suggest some simple ways to deal with "mooks".
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MortonStromgal
First Post
Personally I like wound modifiers, this is usually in systems with health levels like Savage Worlds, World of Darkness, and Shadowrun to name a few. I like systems where after I get hit I'm taking a penalty to my rolls cus it hurts.
I think Savage Worlds has one of the more innovative ways to do it that I have seen recently (as far as the shaken mechanic), though I find that game relies too much on bennies for straight up survivability imo.
That said, I do believe that any game should seriously consider the "PC get out of jail free card mechanic". Often called hero points, fate points, destiny points, etc etc.
One of the design concerns with a damage system is around the PCs. Most games want to make damage exciting and interesting, but keep the variability or "spike damage" in check so that PCs are not slaughtered due to an unlikely die roll.
Each game does this to a certain extent, the amount depends on your choice of style (gritty vs wuxia). However, doing so requires compromises to your system.
I feel that one of the more elegant solutions to this problem is the mechanic I mentioned above. It basically lets the PCs cheat the system. You can create a system where a crit can be devastating, but the PCs have point mechanics (or some other version) that allows them to partially or completely mitigate those rough patches of damage.
What is so amazingly simple about this mechanic, is that it frees you from worrying about PC survivability as much when designing the system. You can mechanically create a death trap, but still allow for PC to survive "Just because they are that good".
I personally felt that Savage Worlds uses the mechanic far too liberally (everytime I played I felt I was throwing bennies into the pot just to stay alive), but from a design standpoint, I have been continually impressed by that type of mechanic.
That said, I do believe that any game should seriously consider the "PC get out of jail free card mechanic". Often called hero points, fate points, destiny points, etc etc.
One of the design concerns with a damage system is around the PCs. Most games want to make damage exciting and interesting, but keep the variability or "spike damage" in check so that PCs are not slaughtered due to an unlikely die roll.
Each game does this to a certain extent, the amount depends on your choice of style (gritty vs wuxia). However, doing so requires compromises to your system.
I feel that one of the more elegant solutions to this problem is the mechanic I mentioned above. It basically lets the PCs cheat the system. You can create a system where a crit can be devastating, but the PCs have point mechanics (or some other version) that allows them to partially or completely mitigate those rough patches of damage.
What is so amazingly simple about this mechanic, is that it frees you from worrying about PC survivability as much when designing the system. You can mechanically create a death trap, but still allow for PC to survive "Just because they are that good".
I personally felt that Savage Worlds uses the mechanic far too liberally (everytime I played I felt I was throwing bennies into the pot just to stay alive), but from a design standpoint, I have been continually impressed by that type of mechanic.
Wanderlust
First Post
Umbran, I a big fan of both the Weird and Wasted Wests. I've been playing Deadlands and HoE since they came out in the late '90s. My thing is that I want to make a system that is somewhere between the quick elegance of Savage Worlds and the ridiculously slow--but crunchy--Deadlands classic. We once had a single round of combat last three hours in a DL game (we were having fun, though).
Wanderlust
First Post
Stalker0, I'm a big fan of fate/bennies/action/hero points. I think they're kind of a must.
For my RPG system, I went with a modified version of a couple systems (Inspirations from Savage Words, D&D, etc)
A person can have 1 to 4 hp based on the experience points they have spent on their skills/abilities/etc (99% have only 1).
Roll damage. This is compared to a threshold (A static number determined by Constitution, armor, and certain stuff bought with XP). less than the Threshold, it does nothing. Equal or greater can daze the foe (Small cuts, bruises, etc fall in here). beat it by 10? Take a wound (1 hp) - by 20 = 2 wounds, etc.
It moves fast with no real book-keeping and has worked well thus far. It is also good at showing permanent damage. A 1 hp wound will leave a scar if you survive. 2 hp in one shot is going to remove something from your body...
PCs can also use their Hero Dice to add d6s to their rolls to avoid getting hit (Or to their hit rolls), and even potentially as a bonus to their threshold vs damage if they have spent the xp for the ability...
Smoss
A person can have 1 to 4 hp based on the experience points they have spent on their skills/abilities/etc (99% have only 1).
Roll damage. This is compared to a threshold (A static number determined by Constitution, armor, and certain stuff bought with XP). less than the Threshold, it does nothing. Equal or greater can daze the foe (Small cuts, bruises, etc fall in here). beat it by 10? Take a wound (1 hp) - by 20 = 2 wounds, etc.
It moves fast with no real book-keeping and has worked well thus far. It is also good at showing permanent damage. A 1 hp wound will leave a scar if you survive. 2 hp in one shot is going to remove something from your body...
PCs can also use their Hero Dice to add d6s to their rolls to avoid getting hit (Or to their hit rolls), and even potentially as a bonus to their threshold vs damage if they have spent the xp for the ability...
Smoss
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Sorry for the delay in answering [MENTION=4738]Wanderlust[/MENTION]
Nope, it never felt slow at all - it actually felt dynamic, quick and very 'real', even though you had roll to hit, defender may roll to parry, if you hit roll hit location and damage, apply damage to hit location after subtracting for armour. Could be more than one attack in a round for especially talented combatants.
All the elements were mechanically very simple; that contributed to making it feel to me much less slow than, say, 4e where there is a lot of choosing of power to use, attempting to hit, applying damage and looking up a particular side effect, remembering to do saves against ongoing effect (or whether an effect is until start of your next turn, or end of your next turn, or something else).
For a lousy 1990's example, it reminds me of the difference between RISC and CISC CPUs. RISK had simpler instructions which it processed more quickly, and so in the end could do more than the standard complex instruction Intel chips. It's a lousy example which can't be taken any further, but hopefully it might illustrate the benefits I saw in a dozen years or more of RQ2
Cheers
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Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Another couple of damage system variants:
Original Traveller - damage applied to attributes.
Your PC has Strength, Dexterity, Endurance and a bunch of others (intelligence, education, social standing?) All basically rolled on 2d6, but can get up as high as 15 or as low as 1 from various modifiers.
When you take damage (normally as a number of d6's, depending upon the weapon), those d6's have to be applied against your physical attributes, reducing them. IIRC it was a little like backgammon, as you had to apply whole dice damage to each attribute. So if someone stabbed you with a dagger for 6 damage and you had Str, Dex and End each at 5, you would have to reduce one of those to 0 and fall unconscious. You couldn't take 3 off each attribute and keep going. There was some important decision making going on because if all three physical attributes were reduced to 0, you were dead. Someone blessed with high scores in all three could survive more hits, but you ended up more likely to actually die if you ran all three attributes down as low as you could. Essentially the player had quite a large say in when he was taken out of the combat and how badly.
Original Traveller - damage applied to attributes.
Your PC has Strength, Dexterity, Endurance and a bunch of others (intelligence, education, social standing?) All basically rolled on 2d6, but can get up as high as 15 or as low as 1 from various modifiers.
When you take damage (normally as a number of d6's, depending upon the weapon), those d6's have to be applied against your physical attributes, reducing them. IIRC it was a little like backgammon, as you had to apply whole dice damage to each attribute. So if someone stabbed you with a dagger for 6 damage and you had Str, Dex and End each at 5, you would have to reduce one of those to 0 and fall unconscious. You couldn't take 3 off each attribute and keep going. There was some important decision making going on because if all three physical attributes were reduced to 0, you were dead. Someone blessed with high scores in all three could survive more hits, but you ended up more likely to actually die if you ran all three attributes down as low as you could. Essentially the player had quite a large say in when he was taken out of the combat and how badly.
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